Yes, They Really Were Watching You

Click here for an article at The Washington Post by Greg Miller, entitled "The intelligence coup of the century," subtitled "For decades, the CIA read the encrypted communications of allies and adversaries."

The CIA, in partnership with the BND (West German spy agency), ran a company called Crypto AG which had its roots in programs similar to Enigma. Crypto got its start encoding transmissions by U.S. troops in WWII. Secretly taken over by the CIA, it spent decades selling encryption hardware, software, and techniques to foreign governments and businesses. Then the CIA and the BND sat back and read what everybody was saying -- secretly, they thought. "... the United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets."

“It was the intelligence coup of the century,” the CIA report concludes. “Foreign governments were paying good money to the U.S. and West Germany for the privilege of having their most secret communications read by at least two (and possibly as many as five or six) foreign countries.”

"They monitored Iran’s mullahs during the 1979 hostage crisis, fed intelligence about Argentina’s military to Britain during the Falklands War, tracked the assassination campaigns of South American dictators and caught Libyan officials congratulating themselves on the 1986 bombing of a Berlin disco."

Consider Trump's bumbling release of intelligence secrets: "Foreign targets were tipped off by the careless statements of public officials including President Ronald Reagan."

"The German spy agency, the BND, came to believe the risk of exposure was too great and left the operation in the early 1990s. But the CIA bought the Germans’ stake and simply kept going, wringing Crypto for all its espionage worth until 2018, when the agency sold off the company’s assets, according to current and former officials."

"The company’s importance to the global security market had fallen by then, squeezed by the spread of online encryption technology. Once the province of governments and major corporations, strong encryption is now as ubiquitous as apps on cellphones."